Firefox 3.5 Pushes Mozilla Back Among the Top of the Browser Heap

By Jim Rapoza |
Posted 2009-07-01

Firefox 3.5 Pushes Mozilla Back Among the Top of the Browser Heap

By pretty much any measure, Mozilla's Firefox browser has been a huge
success. Firefox is one of the most successful open-source applications of all
time, second only to the Apache Web server. And in just a few short years,
Firefox has been able to take significant market share away from Microsoft's
Internet Explorer, a task that seemed impossible when Firefox first launched.

But in the last year, Firefox has faced challengers in areas in which it was
always comfortably ahead of IE, such as innovative new features, standards
support and reliability. In many ways, the only claim to superiority that
Firefox most recently had over rivals such as Apple Safari, Google Chrome and
Opera was in its large community of add-ons.

However, with the release of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has addressed many of the
biggest problems of its Web browser. And, while most of the new features are
under the hood, Firefox 3.5's improvements are enough to push it back among the
top Web browsers in all areas and to make it one of the more significant new
browser releases. The improvements are also enough to gain Firefox 3.5 an eWEEK
Labs Analyst's Choice.

Among the biggest criticisms leveled at recent versions of Firefox have been
slow performance and poor reliability, with many claiming that Firefox drags
after long browsing sessions and that it is prone to crashing. To be fair,
these problems were often due more to the add-ons used than to the browser
itself, but, with Version 3.5, Firefox appears to have fixed most of these
issues.

In my tests of the betas, release candidates and final version of Firefox
3.5, I have found the browser to be very stable. I've seen no noticeable
slowdowns, even with large numbers of open windows and tabs.

And when it comes to performance, Firefox and its new browser engine look to
have improved significantly. In multiple tests using online resources,
including Futuremark's Peacekeeper benchmark,
Firefox 3.5 showed considerable performance gains, more than doubling the speed
of Firefox 3.0. And while it still lags behind performance leaders such as
Safari 4 and Chrome 2.0, Firefox 3.5 is now much more comparable.

HTML 5 Support

HTML 5 Support

However, a much more significant new feature in Firefox 3.5 is its extensive
support for HTML 5. Although it is not yet a full World Wide Web Consortium
standard, HTML 5 is already offering an intriguing glimpse into the future of
the Web. Indeed, HTML 5 is much more than just the next version of HTML; it is
a reimagining of the Web and how browsers work, providing many of the same
powerful GUI interactions that one gets from RIA (rich Internet application)
platforms or even desktop applications.

One of the more interesting aspects of Firefox 3.5's support for HTML 5 is
in its handling of video. Throughout the history of the Web, browsers have
treated video as a second-class citizen, relying on plug-ins and other
applications to handle video. However, through its implementation of HTML 5,
Firefox 3.5 can handle video directly, in the same way that the browser can
display images or text.

This means much more than just the ability to play video in a Web page. With
this implementation, video can be integrated with other Web content in ways
that are much more difficult to do using traditional methods. Video can react
immediately to actions performed within the Web page, and Web content can be
changed in response to things that happen within the videos. There are many
interesting demos available on the Web showing the power of this integration,
and I think they are just scratching the surface of what HTML 5 will enable.

While this is one of the most intriguing new capabilities of Firefox 3.5, it
is not an edge the browser will hold for long.

Safari and Opera have also taken strides to support HTML 5, and other
browsers will also soon follow. Of course, in the end, anything that increases
the power of the Web and browsers is probably a good thing for Mozilla.

Along with the HTML 5 support, Firefox 3.5 has also boosted standards
support in general. In the Web Standards Project's Acid3 test, Firefox
3.5 shows considerable improvement over previous versions and does well, though
it is still behind Chrome, Opera and Safari (though well ahead of IE 8).

Playing Catch-up

Playing Catch-up

Most of the other new features in Firefox 3.5 are simply the browser
catching up to capabilities that are already found in competing browsers.

From a visual standpoint, one of the only new things that users will notice
in the new version is the inclusion of a new tab button in the tabs bar. Tab
management has seen some minor improvements, though Firefox still lacks new tab
features akin to Safari's Top Sites or Opera's Speed Dial (though it is
possible to add similar capabilities through extensions).

With Version 3.5, Firefox joins most other modern browsers with the ability
to run in a private browsing mode (often euphemistically knows as "porn mode").
When in this mode, the browser does not save data from the browsing session.

The privacy mode in Firefox 3.5 is fairly well-implemented. While other
browsers use some form of icon to show that the browser is in privacy mode,
Firefox simply displays the words "Private Browsing" within the browser's top
title bar.

Private Browsing is launched either from the Tools menu or by hitting
Ctrl-Shift-P. Launching the mode immediately starts a fresh browsing session,
and when you turn it off, you are immediately returned to whatever pages you
were viewing before launching the privacy mode. This model works well, though it
is a little jarring. I would have liked the option to launch a separate private
browsing window and keep a regular window open, as well.

It is possible within Firefox 3.5 to do some fine-grain post-session editing
of a browser session. For example, when in the browser history, users can
choose a site they've visited and select "Forget about this site" to remove all
traces of having ever visited the Web site.

Another new feature in Firefox 3.5 is Location Aware browsing, which
utilizes the Geolocation API.
With this capability, a user can choose to share (or not share) his or her
location with a Website to gain information, such as businesses in a certain
area. This works through a number of methods, including IP address, Wi-Fi nodes
and GPS systems. This feature will be less
accurate for a desktop-bound system and more accurate for a mobile device or
laptop. (And, of course, a Website can always learn your IP address and gain
some location information, no matter what the browser does.)

As is typical when new versions of Firefox are released, not all extensions
will work upon upgrading. In my tests, only a third of my extensions worked
immediately after upgrading, but I expect that most extensions will be updated
to work with Firefox 3.5 in the near future.

Firefox 3.5 is available for most operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS
X and Windows. To download Firefox 3.5, go to www.mozilla.com.

Chief Technology Analyst Jim Rapoza can be reached at jrapoza@eweek.com.